The PureAcid 68 double very nicely as a freeride board. Its very early to plane for such a small board and it also manages this without excessive sailor input (ie its easy riding). Upwind is good to for a waveboard and this hold even with the standards, fairly small fin. You can tune it for even better upwind fith a slighly larger fin, bot overall the board is not so "fin dependant".

This "high/low grip" terminology (from british, BOARDS mag, I assume) is not how I like to characterise boards (I think they mix up a few related characteristica and simplify too much). Still, the PA68 is MUCH more natural in a straighline than an EVO. You clearly feel both the fins and board working and the board has a well defined balance point. I guess this would make it a high grip design. It one of those boards you jsut stand up and sail away on and I think this characteristica will be even more pronouced at 58 than at my 69 kilos.

5.0 should be no problems at all at 58 kilos (maybe a bigger fin will be good though, especially for B&J use). For me the board started to rech its limit at 5.3, but at 10 kilos less even that should work.

Overall I think the PA 68 will do a great job for Claire. That its a bit shorter and have a more compact feel does not hurt either.

You raise an interesting discussion regarding the Boards terminology. I subscribe to boards and have read the articles on board classification, some of it makes sense but some of it is very confused or even contradictory as I read it.

One of the problems that us "punters" have is that the only way we can gain information is from shop owners, people on the beach, magazine tests, product brochures and forums. Testing a board is great if it is possible but even that only gives an impression because of the time it takes to get used to something different, conditions etc.

The Starboard brochures give a few lines of info but it is very promotional in style rather than specific as you were in the response above.

All this is just a long winded way of getting to the suggestion that it would be great to have the designers/testers of the boards give us their thoughts on what each board is designed to achieve, good points etc. It really needs to be size specific for each range because time and time again the forum highlights differences between sizes of the same board - e.g. Evo 70 and 75 seem to be quite different in character, far more than just a nominal 5l in volume would indicate.

When the iSonics first came out Ian wrote an introductory piece on the forum to give people some understanding of what the design was about. This was excellent, as a suggestion something like this on each size of each board as a link on the site would potentially answer many of the questions, help people make the correct choice and be happier with the product.

Ola, you spend so much time, as does Ian going into real detail in response to queries - if all this was condensed into one easily accessible document I believe it would really be worth something.

The other suggestion I make is that it would be great to have the Boards discussion of wave/wave crossover concepts from a Starboard perspective. To Boards credit they are really trying to help people make sense of what is a very confusing "black art". They simply don&#39;t have the time to test every board on the market and they IMO bring their own brand bias into the picture.

All that aside, the effort you put into your responses is really top notch and much appreciated.

God suggestions Jonathan. As you know, even though many brands tro to be informative in their brochures, it stil pretty much _have_ to come down to promotion. Starboard has at least tried to be informative with the "compared to" section where different boards lines are compared to each other. To get more specific answers the customers can alsways ask questions here, and then we also have the opportunity to try to personalize the answers.

Still, I&#39;ve been thinking about the kind of document you describe quite a lot. The problem is that it takes quite some time to prepare it since any time you try to be a bit more general it get difficult. It actually quite a lot easier to just answer specific questions... Adn to get designers and top riders (Scott, Kevins etc) to write is even harder. They frequently anwer questions too, but they also have other things to do... I actually talked to Fanatic shaper Sebastian Wenzel about this and he pretty much said he hated all this forum stuff. It simply took to much of the time that he need to design boards. He still chums on on the Fanatic forum, probably because he still understands this is a part of the job, but his view is perfectly understandable, I think.

As for BOARDS, I&#39;ve had some discussions with them and many readers on their web, but its hard since they always assume I come in with a promotional attitude (which in a sense will be inevitable, but which is at the same time not my main intent). I also think its great that they try to find easily understandable characteristica for wave and crossover boards, but at the same time I know how hard it is and that it is very easy to over simplify.